I try to make it seem like I'm just getting this out,
but I know all the moves, I know every little piece of it.
One... Two...Three...
It's just here, just go here.
This is what a Louis C. K. joke looks like.
It's a short one, only 207 words.
But they're 207 words that are chosen very purposefully,
practiced until every one counts for something.
Today I want to go through this joke beat by beat,
and explore how Louis C. K. constructs and performs his comedy.
My girls are six and nine now.
They're actually a really exciting age because they're learning to do some cool stuff.
Every joke has to have a premise,
an idea that the inevitable punch line will snap comedically into place.
The premise should be really clear,
whether it's implied as in some one-liners or stated outright.
As Chris Rock once said,
A lot of comedians have great jokes,
and they don't, like, why isn't this working?
It's not working because the audience does not understand the premise.
In this case the premise has two parts, accomplished in two sentences.
First, Louis is playing monopoly with his daughters,
and second,
The second part of this premise is beautifully structured.
because besides very lucidly delivering the premise
that this joke is going to be how a six-year-old girl learns what it means to lose in Monopoly
Louis actually get some laughs out of the sentence
by the addition of a couple words and a strategic rhythm.
I mean the simplest way to end the sentence is to say that
she's not emotionally developed enough to handle losing at Monopoly,
but instead, he says, to handle her
In this way Louie adds two little comedic surprises in the premise
and make sure to include a pause so that each can be appreciated in their own beat.
To handle her
Comedians Like Louis C.K. are experienced enough to master
not only their own delivery,
but where the laughs will occur in their jokes, and how to deal with them.
Telling a joke is like riding a wave of feeling,
and if you watch Louis C.K.'s comedy, you'll see that
during laughs what he does is emphasize his last line.
It doesn't give the audience new information.
He augments the information just given,
something that he actually learned how to do brilliantly from Jerry Seinfeld.
I'm opening for Jerry in front of like twelve hundred or twenty five hundred people,
and people are applauding bits.
And I had never encountered that, I didn't know how to handle it.
I asked Jerry what to do, and he said, " you stay in the bit. "
You stay in the bit they're reacting to.
If you're angry and that's why they're applauding,
you stay in that energy.
Because the Monopoly loss is dark.
It's heavy.
It's not like
The choice of Candyland here, though Louie acts as if it was pulled out of thin air,
is the perfect counterpoint to Monopoly.
It's visual. The game pops straight into your mind is an object of colourful innocence.
The dramatization and the funny voices also performed like it was spontaneously made up.
But the words and the images he uses, like fudgy thing and gummy twirly-o's,
are carefully chosen to enhance that visual sense.
Louis is never not in control,
and that's important, because
since the premise has been so strongly set up
and the counterpoint drawn out so vividly,
the laughs that Louis gets here are actually laughs in anticipation of a punchline not yet said.
The audience's already imagining how dark the Monopoly loss is going to be.
Just watch how he gradually increases these anticipatory laughs,
like the audience is a fiddle, to the final three-word punchline.
Gotta give it all to me.
Give it to me. That's right.
One thing Louis doesn't get recognized for enough, in my opinion,
is his ability to dramatize in his jokes.
When he acts out this conversation with his daughter,
the light touchy gives, especially with that hand movement right on the punch line,
really locks the audience into the space where he wants them to be.
The audience needs to see this situation from a six-year-old perspective for it to work.
And if he succeeded, the tags or the two additional punchlines that follow
will be that much more devastating and hilarious.
You're going down hard. It's really bad.
Casting the audience in the perspective of a six-year-old is important for another reason
because I think on a deeper level Louis is actually trying to make a comment here
on the actual ruthlessness of the economy we live in
where property really is taken away from people
sometimes by monopolistic interests with debt to spare.
That's the thing his daughter is not emotionally developed enough to comprehend.
And when we see it through her eyes,
the reality seems even darker than it usually does.
Especially in the final tag,
You know more than anything else,
I think I'm obsessed with articulation, with the magic of putting things just the right way.
There are 207 words in this joke, and not a single one is wasted
They're used either in meaning or in rhythm to contribute to the overall effect,
an effect that lets us see the world from a different angle,
And more importantly, makes us laugh.
Like great poetry, great stand-up comedy is language distilled to its most potent form.
And these days, few people distill it better than Louis C.K.